A Year Well Spent: Farewell to Mr. Kim
By Lucas Xia ’28
As I sat down with Mr. Kevin Kim in the basement of the AMC, his usual casualness obscured the busy week he was having: juggling his final few days at Milton, a move to New Haven, and a graduation from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that Thursday. That mix of confidence and warmth is exactly what makes him so loved by his students.
Mr. Kim found his way to Milton uncoincidentally. He moved to Boston to pursue his Ed. M. at Harvard after his undergraduate degree, and concurrently had his first year of teaching at Nobles and Greenough. Yet, as Mr. Kim’s residential situation required more space, he expanded his horizons to Milton Academy. “I wanted the housing while having a similar job,” he explained, laughing. “So that led me to Milton, because then I could also finish my graduate school while I’m here.” For the past year, he taught in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments and commuted to Harvard for evening classes three times a week. He remarks, “It kept me busy, definitely.”
In the classroom, Mr. Kim worked differently from most teachers. Early on, he explicitly told his students not to worry about their grades. “If you’re really worried about your grade, come talk to me and we’ll find a way for you to get the grade you want if you put in the work,” he asserted. “Let’s worry about the learning. And when you’re here… just be fully engaged in the learning.” Alex Ning ‘27, a student in Mr. Kim’s AI & Machine Learning (ML) course, explains that this philosophy was not performative: “The way he grades is not necessarily on scoring your homework,” but rather on “participating and trying.” Ning expressed the “huge influence it had on how [he] learns in that class, more than [he] would’ve if it were a traditional classroom.”
An aspect of Milton that caught Mr. Kim off guard was the strength of the CS program. Admittedly, he came in without high expectations, but shared that the fact that the department runs three full sections of the AI & ML class, combined with sections of Advanced Topics in AI, deeply impressed him. Outside of his teaching, Mr. Kim found his home in the small but tight-knit CS department. “Sometimes, instead of meeting and talking about work, we’ll just go play a game or go get a smoothie nearby,” he said. “Those are the things that I’ll remember.” He was equally candid regarding his challenges here: students in his math classes often aim solely for an A plus at the cost of their learning. “I think that mission kind of gets hindered when the math department has a reputation of being the easy or the nice department that [students] have to get a high grade in,” Mr. Kim reflects.
Mr. Kim’s departure stems from his wife’s acceptance into Yale University’s PhD program, an opportunity he deems “too good to pass up.” He plans to find a similar teaching position near New Haven, sharing that he will miss the department and Milton students dearly.